by Brian Hodge
“Skulls, they’re really resonant,” Andre said. “He told me in one of the dreams that powerful damarus can wake the dead.”
The idea was interesting enough to get me sidetracked, forget the moment and think of what was really going on here. The raising of a new army, maybe, or founding of a new religion of the null and void. Of course it was very Darwinian in nature, you couldn’t deny that, but it had gone this far, so who was I to judge.
Axl was compliant again, scouring the second skull, and I saw that it’d already been peeled and partially cleaned, and so easier to ignore that not all that long ago there had been a face on it, atop someone’s shoulders, someone who’d been laughing or shouting or crying.
I looked up, far above Nihil in that gabled tower, past the pulleys and chains, looked toward the day’s last light, thinking they’d better get the fire going again, or no one would be able to see and maybe they would freeze. Through the broken boards swirled fine snow, and now out of the wind it drifted straight down, and I moved over before Nihil and shared it with him, that first kiss of winter.
The snowflakes melted upon his skin, Nihil warmer than room temperature at least, while behind drooping eyelids the orbs were twittering back and forth again, dreamer’s eyes. I wondered if he was privy to things miles away, in Chicago’s coldest heart. If in his vast expanding mind he saw a canvas of brick and cinderblock, and on it a constantly unfolding mural of slaughter and kickbacks, and if it flowed, a story like in a movie, or if it was just what it was, random and senseless, like coming attractions.
Snowflakes on my face, I remembered being here that winter day with my father, hating how such a simple sensation can take you back so far, so fast, so thoroughly.
And I remembered Jamaal, being with him in this room the day after his sister was burned. Where was he now, anyway, and did he that day wonder where his life would lead, or did he try to shut out all thoughts of the future, suspecting that nothing good could come of it?
Snowflakes running down our faces, Nihil grunted and grinned.
The fire was going by now, smoke rising pale gray, and in the play of flame and shadow, among their four silhouettes, I saw the tallest lift his arm above the smallest, staggering off balance as he swung the sledge mallet. In the meat locker hush came a thud of case-hardened steel against curving bone, occipital I think, and at the instant of impact Nihil twitched and strained and panted and pulled at the wires that traversed his inner realm, as though he’d felt it across the room and all the way down to marrow.
The blow had been glancing, the puny boy screeching as he buckled to his knees, but Cheyenne and Axl caught his shoulders. I was flying across the room without having thought to, Andre braced for another swing, telling the keening boy how sorry he was that he’d messed up, he’d do better this time, and maybe it was true, that if slaughterhouses had glass walls we’d all be vegetarians.
Andre malleted the boy a second time before I could ram into him, and everybody tumbled, and I could hear the excitable squeak of the bedsprings, then I wrested the sledge away from Andre and knocked him on the knee, and when we disentangled he was crying, crying and hiccuping, sounding no different than when we were in third grade, except the spectators weren’t laughing.
He rolled onto all fours, favoring the one knee, and after I stood over him, sledge in hand, he lowered his head and stretched his neck out, body still except for the shudders from his sobbing. When I didn’t move he began begging me to do it, although whether he wanted to sacrifice himself to Nihil or simply end everything wasn’t clear to me. But nothing much ever was.
I dropped the mallet to the killing floor with a clink, and Andre offered no resistance when I stripped the long canvas coat off his back, peeling it away like a skin to drape it around the six-year-old. He was still alive, but silent now, no more wailing left in him as he bled from the back of his head and both ears. He weighed almost nothing in my arms, a scarecrow with pupils fixed and dilated. I wrapped the coat tighter, packing him to travel.
We’d gotten as far as the door when that sound came again, more solid this time, mallet into thicker bone, and when I looked toward the fire and what was going on there I couldn’t make out which was Cheyenne and which Axl, but it didn’t matter, they were taking turns, both silhouettes hopping from foot to foot in their glee, and naturally Nihil loved it, ate it up like ambrosia.
With the boy in my arms I rushed out of the slaughterhouse and through the woods, breath in plumes, the hiss of fresh snow whispering through the trees. In that stillness I was the bull, the violator, shoes mashing layers of dead leaves while I plotted a course to the nearest hospital, Central DuPage probably, I could hand him over at the emergency entrance and fade before anyone could get my license plate, I didn’t even know this boy, how could they connect us?
The lights of the houses grew brighter ahead, and the boy, so weightless before, became heavier with each step. I stopped to adjust and set him down a moment, braced against one bent knee, but in the twilight his face began to streak, blood from both nostrils, and his limbs trembled, weak as a rabbit’s heartbeat, and that was it, he had no more of anything. I watched it leave.
We lay in the leaves and sticks and frost, dusted with snow, then I looked back at the slaughterhouse, where smoke rose from the gabled tower, and I wondered if I shouldn’t see the rest of it through. I’d already amazed myself, taking an actual moral stand on something, so I left the boy on the path for now and went back, back to the killing floor.
Their sledge now still, Cheyenne and Axl were crouched before the fire, wiping their faces clean, while I stood before Nihil. I could cut him into pieces, burn him, stop it here before his dream spread any further. He was as revivified as I’d yet seen, Andre’s skull especially resonant maybe, and his eyes were open, looking, comprehending. They fixed on me with an unblinking struggle to contract his focus to one tiny mite before him.
“I,” he whispered, slow and laborious, “know … you…”
I shriveled. You cannot look upon such a thing, or hear its voice, and feel sure of anything, especially conquering it, except for one: Nothing is as you believed, and is probably worse.
His eyes never left me, two dark malignant stars.
“Ohhhh,” his withered lungs creaked, “negative…”
I’d heard all I wanted, drifting over to sit beside the fire, warming my hands because there was nothing else to do until rush hour traffic thinned. Cheyenne and Axl watched with expectation now that Andre had gone the way of the weak, seeming to expect me to bring them their hamburgers now. Later, when I left, I almost told them to go home until I remembered they were, and the last I saw of them they were tugging on the chains to hoist Nihil and the springs up, up, higher, into the gabled tower and gathering smoke, where he might better see and hear and smell all.
O, he’d said, negative, in recognition, and now I knew what it meant, but could never recall having told Jamey my blood type.
On the path I retrieved the boy, because he deserved better, and carried him to my car, no suburban dweller stopping us because I looked like I knew what I was doing, every wet mile of the way, southeast, into a buffering industrial zone before Chicago peters out into farmland.
No one lived near, and it was too late for blue collars and too cold for gangbangers. We had the wastescape to ourselves, a jagged field of refuse like the worst of Belfast or Beirut, or an elephant graveyard, only for a city, iron bones and entrails everywhere you looked. On clearer days you could look north and see the skyscrapers of downtown.
I could never have left the boy at the slaughterhouse, had no reason to believe he had much of any family who would do right by him and his pock-burned arm, so I carried him into the scrapyard for the most fitting mausoleum I knew: the big boiler that Mae and Jamey and I had turned into a giant drum one Sunday last summer.
This time it was empty, although Mae had never known any different, and it was out of the wind and elements, just a cut-out heart that had long ago c
eased thumping. In there I laid him, with his soggy head, wrapped in an olive coat big enough for a shroud, and I wished I’d had a flower or two to leave, but it was the wrong season, and always would be for him.
*
We’d chanced across the boiler while exploring, Jamey always on the lookout for new sound sources, and to him this place was a playground, if one where anyplace you fell you’d contract tetanus. I remember him running both hands over the boiler’s plated hull, asking, “Who could throw away something with this much potential?”
“The world is full of stupid people,” Mae said. “Why not just give up and try to blend?”
At Jamey’s instigation we took bars of scrap metal and began hammering away to see what the thing sounded like, a deep hollow gonging of incredible density. Soon we found our rhythm to work around, something of our individual selves given over to a group mind. It happened naturally, bypassing thought, the reverberations taking us over as we swung and sweated and felt our arms thrumming with each impact, down to the pits of our stomachs, until it felt as though the boiler were playing us instead. We served it, dancing to its massive peal, until we felt we might raise such shockwaves we could collapse the city into piles of rubble, if only we had the stamina to play that long.
And when our arms gave out and echoes rang, Jamey wiped sweat from his forehead and said, “I’ve got to bring my remote DAT down and record this sometime,” then he ran to a port where some intake pipe might’ve once connected, crawling halfway through to listen to the last dying echo.
We asked him what it was like, if he heard God, and moments later he backed out, with a subdued and thoughtful frown. He dug for car keys and handed them to Mae, asking if she’d do him an enormous favor and check his trunk, he might’ve left a tape deck in there after all.
Mae said, “I’m nobody’s coolie, you know,” but went anyway.
“You lied, didn’t you?” I said, because he had, and when Mae was halfway to the car Jamey motioned me to follow his lead and we crawled into the boiler like a giant womb.
We stared at the withering vagrant curled in his rags and filth, features sunken, one desiccated hand atop an empty bottle, and Jamey wondered aloud how long he’d been there, and I said long enough to turn halfway into a mummy, baked inside here.
“Why didn’t you want Mae to know?” I asked.
“I just didn’t,” he said, and shrugged. Then: “She’s seen enough for being nineteen. Her mother quit eating, some reason, disappointed in Mae, like that. Shriveled up and died. She didn’t say much. I thought this guy might…”
No need to finish.
“I didn’t know any of that,” I said.
“Now you do.”
Why I made the connection I don’t know, but under the crud and whiskers and haggard years this vagrant could’ve been fifty, and I said, “For all I know? That could be my father.”
Jamey nodded, understanding everything. “For all I know, a year from now, it could be me.” Then he nudged my arm. “Joke.”
We left the boiler, nothing more to see or say. Back at the car Mae told him thanks for nothing, sending her on a false alarm, but she was quick to forgive. Jamey eased into a big smile, just the most heartening thing, as this time it carried up to his eyes, and it meant different things to each of us, I’m sure, but to both of us he seemed to be saying that everything was going to be okay … and for the rest of that day, at least, it really was.
*
After I’d entombed the boy, with the requisite lack of prayers, I headed for home, although not directly, first stopping by a leather shop on Belmont and buying a pair of handcuffs from their kink counter, and no one remarked on or even paid any particular attention to the smeared blood on my clothing, but it was the kind of thing that wouldn’t go unnoticed at home.
“What happened?” Rachel said. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
I assured them I was fine. “I tried to help this puppy, it’d been, you know, been hit,” and shook my head so they understood.
“Oh, why’d you tell us that?” said Mae. “That’s sad, that’s just too sad, I hate even thinking about it, can’t stand it,” and Rachel and I brushed the hair from her face, and she was so very fragile in her way, so delicate, needing more protection than I’d ever imagined.
I took a hot shower and put on fresh clothing, then watched TV with them awhile until deciding to get to work, coming up with a few long nails to permanently seal the windows near the fire escape. A neighbor complained about the hammering, pounding on the wall in counterattack, but it was over soon. I checked the door, all three locks secured, but I could get more.
“Angus?” said Rachel, behind me. “Angus?” She must’ve called four or five times before I caught on. “What’s the matter with you?”
“There’s a lot of sick people out there,” I said, as if this were news, then put away the hammer, smiling at Mae and taking her by the hand, gently, so she wouldn’t worry. I led her into the bedroom, had her kneel, and she must’ve thought it was a game of sorts because she grinned with uncertainty and trust, even while I handcuffed her to the radiator and asked, “Would you like anything to read?”
Rachel quit trying for the key eventually, and stayed with Mae the rest of the night, hours I spent sitting before the living room windows, fighting sleep, watching streetlights and skylines.
But mostly I thought of the slaughterhouse and the years, and the interrelationship between them, trying to comprehend all that those walls had witnessed. And I felt that I understood them just a bit better now, those cows with flattened skulls convulsing in the abattoir, this factory designed to mulch them into patties and grease for a city of mouths always hungry for more.
The sun came up, gray skies over fresh snow, but beneath it the same old city, where somewhere even now a line was forming for me to stand in, so I went out to find it, and join the herd.
Endnotes: The Ticking Of An Unfriendly Clock
Once upon a time, an exceptional writer named Peter Straub wrote a sprawling, dark fairy tale of a novel called Shadowland. I happily gave myself over to it for several days, probably to some detriment of the college classes I was taking the autumn it came out in paperback, now within reach of budget-conscious students.
Its coda — just a handful of pages — Straub titled “The End of the Century Is in Sight.” Now, as then, it’s a deceptively simple phrase that invokes bound less wonder. A phrase of transition, of natural magic and horizons, is how it struck me, perhaps because it’s mythic, in a sense, and undeniably true.
The end of the century is indeed in sight … and a good sight closer now than when I first read those words nearly fifteen years ago. Not only the end of the century, but the millennium, as well. How privileged we are, how anointed. How many people get to witness the rollover to a year with that many zeroes?
The last time, with the Old World mucking about the Dark Ages and the New lying undiscovered by all but those who already lived here in no great need of discovery, Europe succumbed to millennial fever, running rampant with rumors and signs, fears and portents of catastrophe. Traditionally there’s a swell in interest in all things spiritual, supernatural, and unexplained at the shutdown of any century. Add another zero and, on a purely mathematical basis, chaos should jump by a factor of ten. As the year 1000 approached, hordes of pungent and not terribly well nourished people remained unswayed in their belief that the planetary warranty was about to expire.
While the joke was on them, we shouldn’t feel too smug. Despite the past millennium of learning, with the shadow of 2000 falling ever closer to our heads, it should be no surprise when prophets again rise up, with zeal equal to that of their Old World forerunners, to make the same proclamation. Some say it’s already begun, and with the Branch Davidian cookout in Waco still in plain hindsight, who can argue?
But here’s the part that prophets always seem to overlook: Measurement of time is a human construct. A construct based on planetary orbit and our dance with the su
n, true, but our spinning blue oblate spheroid neither knows nor cares what year it is, and regardless of which Creator you believe in, if any, I defy anyone to posit a sound reason why that Entity should follow our arbitrary timetable.
Which leads us to the inevitable conclusion:
If the end of this century — much less this millennium — is the final one witnessed by anything resembling present civilization … who is really to blame?
A few weeks ago my love and I were spending her birthday in St. Louis when we stopped by a small art gallery, where I bought for her a piece that we both found haunting. Afterward we talked awhile with the director, who by now appeared to have forgiven me for earlier starting to unsheathe a Japanese tachi leaning against the wall and invoking his keen admonition not to. As I’ve done with a lot of friends over the years, I’d simply demonstrated once more that I’m one of those people who isn’t happy until I’ve played with the sharpest thing in the room.
Later, when we were talking — while he was showing us knives honed from railroad spikes, so I knew all was forgiven — he said, “I think the next ten years are going to see the emergence of a very different configuration for this country.” There was nothing particularly optimistic in the way he said this; more a grim and clear-eyed resignation in its inevitability, and he was obviously no believer in imminent Utopias.
Which may explain the presence of that Japanese sword.
It’s stuck with me, what he said, because at that time this collection was in the midst of being compiled, its final novella still taking shape, and much of what he’d implied that day was elemental in the stories that I’d deemed thematically appropriate to include. Although I sense that what the gallery director said was less an example of synchronicity than simply something on a lot of people’s minds lately.
